Today is Martin Luther King Jr Day in the United States, the third Monday in January a public holiday. In the manifest absence of even the slightest reverence for King, let’s at least hope that this country – moving further and further away from MLK Jr. on a daily basis – does just a little less harm on this very day than on all the other days of the year.
I’m not going to write about him today. I just want my subscribers and other readers to be aware that our Transnational Foundation has published numerous articles about or related to this truly great visionary – since 2018 about 40 pieces. You may see them all here.
Like Gandhi and other moral leaders in theory and practise, I commemorate and publish them because they were extraordinary human beings, because their thinking and deeds remain essentially important – they have, I would say, eternal relevance – because they keep inspiring me in my private and public life and – perhaps most of all – they remind us of the fact that such towering advocates have been possible, have been listened to – and hated so they had to be killed – and left something important for us all to reflect on decades later. And always will, I believe.
I also cherish and publish them because they tell you how far we have moved away from fully possible, realistic ideals of violence reduction and nonviolence into the abysmal celebration of raw violence in all its forms and shapes – direct, psychological, cultural, structural, genderwise and through mechanisms of racism, state terrorism, nuclearism and the complete contempt for those who seem “different” or “weak.”
In one of his last speeches, he almost shouts that he seems to have heard God say: “America, you are too arrogant” and that if the US doesn’t change its ways, its role as a global policeman, “I will break the backbone of your power and place it in the hands of a nation that does not even know my name…”
Indeed, prophetic.
I’ve recently come across two very different but interesting articles. In the Covert Action Magazine, Jeremy Kuzmarov asks: Did J. Edgar Hoover Order the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr? – and starts: “mounting evidence suggests that King may have been murdered as part of a conspiracy planned and/or abetted by the FBI in coordination with local Memphis police personnel. In this scenario, Ray served as a patsy, like critics allege Lee Harvey Oswald was in the JFK assassination. The real shooter, according to these accounts, struck King not from the boardinghouse bathroom—allegedly from where Ray shot him—but from bushes behind the Lorraine Motel—the King assassination’s version of the grassy knoll.”
The King family wants the case to be re-opened. It’s convinced that MLK Jr was not killed by a lone assassin.
It’s a long article and contains also some very moving historical documentary photos from the crime scene.
The other article is a quite ironic comment on why – and what role it plays that – the racism-based US celebrates him even today. It’s by Michael Harriot, MLK is revered today but the real King would make white people uncomfortable published by The Guardian today, January 17, 2022.
